There is a specific thread of experimental musician whose real motive is to deal in mystery and wonder. Think conceptualists like Brian Eno and David Bowie, sonic conjurers Sunn O))), transcendent improvisers as varied as Alice Coltrane and Loren Connors, song mystic Annette Peacock—each artist’s work is tied to something that happens beyond the notes, something bigger than just the sounds we hear. And for the listener, there are no easy answers. You can research and dissect compositional and production methods, know all of the gear that was used inside and out, break down all of the influences. But you’re always left with something to chase, to try and understand more deeply. For some, that’s the thrill.
Steve Tibbetts works with these ineffable parts of music, and he has ever since his 1977 self-titled debut. His albums create experiences that, at times, approach definability, but remain elusive: He’s a guitarist, but his music isn’t necessarily “guitar music”; his work is rooted in traditions, but it’s not traditional. So, what is it?
Since the beginning of the 1980s, Tibbetts’ records have been released primarily on the ECM label—the longstanding preeminent home of meditative and ambient jazz and jazz-adjacent sounds. On his earlier releases, you may hear grooves assembled around percussion from various global cultures mixed with suspended 12-string acoustic strumming, soaring evocative melodies, and, at times, blazing electric guitar solos. The cover images on his albums are striking, and often created by the composer himself, capturing some moment in a similarly un-pinnable land—check out the rock formations on either 1980’s Yr or 1986’s Exploded View, for example. The whole blissed-out package is conceptually inspired by place and tradition, yet totally untethered and fresh.
“If I just sat around and played guitar all day long, I don’t know how that would go.”
On more recent releases, and especially on his latest, Close, Tibbetts’ sound has evolved toward something else—more big-picture, but also more personal. Raw and organic sounds mix with a futuristic sonic landscape (and yet, he uses antiquated technology to create those sounds). Closefeels like a universal meditation, a grand vision that pulls sounds from across the globe and reaches beyond, toward some distant sonic horizon, overcoming instrument and process. Basically, it sounds like nothing else.
Enigmatic as that is, over the course of an hour or so on our video call, Tibbetts himself proved to be anything but. Speaking from his wood-paneled Minnesota studio, where he’s made much of his music since 1985, he revealed his process and the philosophy behind it—a methodology deeply tied to his own experience of the world.
For Tibbetts, creation starts simply. “You have to sit down and put your hands on the instrument,” he explains. And it’s all about vibe. “Sometimes, it's a matter of getting the guitar warmed up. Hoping for the right humidity in the room.”
In order to keep things moving, his studio is always ready to go—his mics in position and DAW loaded up. “The process is to come to the studio, make a cup of coffee, begin to play, and see if we get to that point,” he says. He starts solo, bringing in other players further down the line. “Nobody cares how loud I get here. I’ve got a couple of Marshall JCM 800s, a younger Marshall, and as long as I wear adequate ear protection, I’m fine. I can get the sound that I need.”
John Pearse custom 12-string sets with double courses instead of octaves
GHS Boomers (Medium)
A rare live sighting: Tibbetts with Strat and Marshall in Montreal in 2015.
The days slowly add up. “Do you know what it’s like when you wake up in the night and your fingers are throbbing?” he asks. For him, “that usually means it’s been a good, productive day at the studio. Then you come back the next day. Is there anything worthwhile? Probably not. But after five or six years, you’ve got something—30 minutes, 40 minutes worth of pieces.”
As the music takes form, at some point, he brings in collaborators. On Close, Tibbetts is accompanied by percussionist Marc Anderson, his longest-running musical partner, and drummer JT Bates.
“It begins to sort of assemble itself,” he continues. “It is a little bit of a cliché, but at a certain point, you are in service to the music that you've created and you just need to do a good job with it.”
He quickly balances that thought with a dose of reality: “Mostly, the process is one of tedium, boredom, failure, and actually figuring out what I need to do when I've started the car and am on the way home.”
“What a good thing to do, to listen and look at stuff.”
Tibbetts’ music isn’t purely an in-the-studio creation, though. The world outside his walls plays a major role. “If I just sat around and played guitar all day long, I don’t know how that would go. Maybe there are some guitar players who can do it,” he muses. “Sometimes, the process is to give up entirely and go someplace a long ways away and listen to some loops or little lines that you have as you’re walking around.”
That’s the specific method Tibbetts followed on 2018’s Life Of. He explains: “There’s an area in northern Nepal, close to Tibet, called Lhasa. Difficult to get to, but a friend of mine, a professional clown, named Marian, said, ‘We’re going to Lhasa, do you want to come?’ And I thought, I’ll go there, and I’ll make little mp3s, 60 minutes or so, to listen to while we're walking. That’s what I did. When I came back, I had a good idea of what I wanted to do to put things together.”
For those who can’t travel quite so far, he recommends just getting out of your surroundings. “What a good thing to do,” he enthuses, “to listen and look at stuff. Even mixing. I’m looking at the same paneling here all the time. It doesn’t work. You can take your little laptop now and go to a coffee shop and say, ‘This song is gonna be about this couple over here, or that guy drinking coffee by himself.’ Just mess with your mind a little bit.”
“If it’s not fun, I’m not interested.”
Travel has inspired Tibbetts work throughout his career, thanks especially to his early experience working for study-abroad programs in Bali and Nepal. “That was hard work,” he explains, “but I got to live in cultures where there was different music. Balinese gamelan, if I hear it in Minnesota, it’s just annoying. But over there, it sounds like it fits. The double drumming technique, I had to be in it and study it to bring it back.”
Across the globe, Tibbetts has collected the recordings to incorporate in his music. The idea goes back to his 1997 album, Chö, a collaboration with Tibetan singer Choying Drolma. “We made that record in Kathmandu, Nepal,” he says. “Her singing was incredible. I didn’t want to just strum along on guitar, I wanted to use some of the sounds of Tibetan longhorns, some of my own sounds like bowed hammered dulcimer, my wife’s wine glasses….”
Tibbetts continues, “I did that. And then we got an offer to go out on the road. Desperation takes hold. How am I gonna do this? There’s gotta be a way.”
He devised a setup to trigger samples with his guitar using a Roland MIDI pickup that “had a cable that was about as thick as a stalk of corn that went to another box that would jack into a sampler, probably with a SCSI port.” Inconvenient, but, Tibbetts says, “it did work and we did take that on the road, and then I thought, this will be a good composing tool, this will be fun.” He pauses, and adds, “If it’s not fun, I’m not interested.”
More recently, Tibbetts switched to a Fishman wireless system to trigger the samples. But the samples themselves come from an old version of MOTU’s Digital Performer, which requires him to keep his computer “probably 15 operating systems behind what’s current now.” (He jokingly explains: “I’m working with antiquated technology. I’ve got buggy whips and wooden wheels here.”)
On Close, Tibbetts lets his acoustic guitar breathe, allowing more string noise and ambient detail into the mix to create a deeper sense of intimacy.
The result is otherworldly. Global sounds enmesh with Tibbetts’ strings, opening up the possibilities of his guitar—a sum-is-greater-than-the-parts experience where you might not realize what exactly is being played or where it’s coming from.
Knowing the sources, however, enriches the experience. Because though some of Tibbetts’ samples are created at home in his studio, many have a story. “I can still hear the chicken in the gong,” he says, launching into a story that goes back to his time working for a study-abroad program in Candi Dasa, Bali. He took the class to visit “a guy that did two things: made sacred knives that they use for ritual activities and had a gong shop.” He explains that gongs for gamelans are all made at the same time to coordinate the orchestra’s tuning, and they visited on a day where new bronze would be poured. “This was a once-in-a-lifetime thing. We went down there and spent a day watching these guys beat the shit out of these things to get them in their own tune, which is still a good 30 or 40 cents off what we would call in tune, but together it sounds good.
He continues: “I spent an extra day there sampling these gongs. I would hit the gong softly. I’d mute it. I would hit it hard.” The gong-maker was curious. “He said, ‘Let me listen to it.’ He listened to it on the headphones and said, ‘I’m sorry my chicken is squawking.’ I said, ‘It’s okay.’ And then the next thing I heard was no chicken squawking. He invited me for dinner. I declined.”
On Close, focused listening reveals another sonic element—the sound from Tibbetts’ acoustic guitar. Often more polished, it’s more raw this time around than on his other records—sometimes you’ll hear buzzing, fretting, and breath sounds. It gives his playing an intimacy, a warmth that stands out. It feels close.
Early in the creation process, Tibbetts wasn’t confident this was a direction he wanted to pursue. So he had Anderson listen to some takes. “People who work alone a lot tend to become a little inbred with themselves, start not understanding what direction they’re going in, or if they’re going in the right direction, or if anything is any good at all,” he muses. “Marc and I have been working together since 1979. His ears are very good. He made me understand that I already knew that this was okay. I just needed confirmation from him.”
He continues, “I am going for the feeling. I guess we’re always going for the feeling, but I just didn’t want to ditch a take because I happened to make a sound, a bad fret sound, a new string sound….”
With Closenow out in the world, don’t hold your breath to catch Tibbetts live—his performances are rare. When asked about this, it’s clear his days of getting in the van are long gone, adding that one-off gigs are also “not that great. It usually takes a few gigs on the road before you get your chops together, lighting, sound, loading in, loading out, your pedals, whatever you have….” But he says there are those occasional gigs that afford the travel, rehearsal time to get it together, and make a compelling enough offer. “If the gig is weird enough and far away enough,” he says, “we'll do it.”
Courtney Cox on melting faces with Burning Witches Guitars, and, frankly, playing better than most people.
Burning Witches guitarist Courtney Cox joins the Axe Lords from her German riff-und-shred-haus to talk technique, tone, and how the band writes and records across borders and works under brutally short studio timelines. The conversation reveals how her ADHD shapes her practice regimen and traces her path from rural Pennsylvania Lacrosse phenom to touring teenage guitar prodigy through her tenure with the Iron Maidens, which as you might have gathered, is an all-female Iron Maide tribute band.
Along the way, Cox discusses her signature Caparison guitars and the realities of being a working guitarist in 2025, from social media burnout and Patreon economics to, of course, pissing off your neighbors.
Axe Lords is presented in partnership with Premier Guitar. Hosted by Dave Hill, Cindy Hulej and Tom Beaujour. Produced by Studio Kairos. Executive Producer is Kirsten Cluthe. Edited by Justin Thomas (Revoice Media). Engineered by Patrick Samaha. Recorded at Kensaltown East. Artwork by Mark Dowd. Theme music by Valley Lodge.
Follow @axelordspod for updates, news, and cool stuff.
The team at the Monte Carlo Masters 2016: Bob Bryan, David Macpherson, Janek Gwizdala, and Mike Bryan.
In late 2015, I basically quit playing bass and spent a year traveling with the Bryan Brothers as their fitness coach. For those not familiar with the tennis world, they’re the most successful doubles team of all time, with 119 titles as a team, 16 Grand Slams, an Olympic gold medal, and a record 438 weeks (including 139 consecutive) at number one in the world.
Much like I’m an amateur tennis player, they’re amateur musicians. We met through music, specifically through our mutual friend James Valentine from Maroon 5, who is also way into tennis.
I was going through a divorce and needed a change of scenery. They had just lost early in the US Open and were back in California, so we started training together. They asked if I wanted to come out on tour with them—initially to make a bit of a documentary, as their career was going to wind down in the not-too-distant future. As we trained more, that morphed into going to the world tour finals in London, me becoming part of the team, working the off-season with them at the end of 2015, and then getting on a plane to Australia to start the 2016 season.
“I realized very early on that any serious tennis player on the modern tour doesn’t step foot on a court or into a gym without a coach or trainer. Ever.”
Early in the season, I woke up to my phone melting down in Australia because Bob had given an interview with The New York Times and mentioned me joining the team: “…Janek Gwizdala, an accomplished jazz musician turned fitness guru.” I didn’t realize how many of my music friends were into tennis until that moment, but they sure let me know about it double-quick. Most didn’t believe I was actually on the tour until I was getting them tickets to come see our matches.
All this is to say, I got to see the real day-to-day workings of professional athletes—not just at the top of their field, but at a historically important and legendary point in their careers. We practiced alongside Nadal and Federer regularly, did cryotherapy with Djokovic, and shot the shit in the physio room with Andy Murray. As a tennis fan, it was off the charts.
But when I eventually returned to being a musician and got back into the swing of my musical career, I carried a lot of priceless information with me from my time running around the world on the ATP Tour.
Most importantly, I realized very early on that any serious tennis player on the modern tour doesn’t step foot on a court or into a gym without a coach or trainer. Ever.
And what do we do as musicians? If—and that’s a big if—we go to some sort of music school between 18 and 22, we leave, we’re flat broke because it cost a fortune, and we might never take another lesson for the rest of our careers.
Not once in my 20s, having quit Berklee and moved to New York City, did I have anyone consistently guiding my playing, my mental capacity to deal with what it takes to break into the New York scene, my choices of gigs, sessions, tours—anything. I had friends, sure. We’d talk and commiserate over certain things. But they had no more experience than I did, for the most part.
Sometimes you’d be lucky enough to make friends with a far more senior musician in the scene, and you’d hang on every word and story like a kid getting to stay up late watching TV you shouldn’t see that young. But as amazing as those stories were, they were stories from a bygone era that bore little relevance to where I was at.
What I’ve made a conscious effort to do over the past decade—since that incredible experience of being in a completely different, intense professional scenario—is seek out advice, mentorship, lessons, and coaching whenever possible. Sometimes that’s been for my music, sometimes for business, other times for health or fitness when I’m trying to add something to my routine and want to get the most out of it.
If you’re a beginner or a pro—especially a pro—get a local teacher. Find someone you trust, someone you respect, and take a lesson once in a while. It’s amazing to have someone to talk to, to gain confidence from, and to help you remember you’re not alone in so many of the things we struggle with as musicians.
When he was 10 years old, Graeme McKinnon walked into a pawn shop near his home in Edmonton, Alberta, and bought his first guitar for $50. It was a sharp-angled, all-black axe made by the Japanese company Profile as a low-cost imitation of a Jackson, with a knife-like headstock that jutted curiously upward.
“It looked like a reaper’s scythe,” McKinnon says, recalling the way he’d carry it around town in an awkwardly shaped gig bag. “Everyone thought I had a hunting rifle.”
It was the early ’90s, in the thick of the Seattle grunge movement, and McKinnon’s older cousin would often come over and play him Pearl Jam songs, which he didn’t really like. But when his guitar teacher showed him the Ramones, something unlocked in the youngster. As he improved his chops, McKinnon and his older brother, a bassist, would jam Dead Kennedys and Beastie Boys songs together. McKinnon was hooked on punk rock. “That’s how I cut my teeth,” he says. “The downstrokes from the Ramones stuck with me forever. I always practiced my right hand.”
Fast forward 30 years, and today McKinnon is one half of the post-punk duo Home Front, one of the most hyped-up bands to emerge from Canada in recent years. And the outfit’s new album Watch It Die should earn them a spot on the Mount Rushmore of the current post-punk revival, alongside other breakouts like Fontaines D.C., Idles, and Viagra Boys.
In 2021, McKinnon’s hardcore punk band No Problem was on hiatus and he was looking for a new outlet. That’s when his childhood friend Clint Frazier, previously a member of the electro dance-punk outfit Shout Out Out Out Out, asked him to start a synth-driven band.
“The downstrokes from the Ramones stuck with me forever. I always practiced my right hand.”—Graeme McKinnon
The style that they created combines the jangly sheen of synth-pop, the sneering attitude of old-school punk rock, and the hard-stomping force of oi! and hardcore. The band nicknamed it “bootwave,” a reference to the distinct sound of winter boots marching on ice-crusted snow or the cold concrete of the streets of Edmonton. “Our sound has this duality,” McKinnon says. “There’s the punk side, there’s the synth side, and it’s always these two forces.”
“We’re just trying to find enough space in the songs to do both of them well,” adds Frazier. “I’ve been trying to do that for over 20 years.”
Ernie Ball Regular Slinky (.045–.130), unchanged since 2019 (bass)
Dunlop .73mm picks
Home Front, anchored by Clint Frazier (center) and Graeme McKinnon (second from left), perform at Edmonton’s Starlite Ballroom in 2023.
Eric Kozakiewicz
Watch It Die follows Home Front’s full-length debut, 2023’s Games of Power. That album earned them positive press from some of the indie-rock scene’s key tastemakers, and it was longlisted for the Polaris Music Prize. The band hit the road hard to support it, embarking on multiple tours of the U.S., the U.K., and mainland Europe, including dates with punk veterans like Dillinger Four and Cock Sparrer, as well as fellow newcomers the Chisel and High Vis.
Like its predecessor, Watch It Die is a record that posits that life is hard, the world is cruel, and it’s easy to feel powerless to make any difference. It’s a headspace that stops just a few yards short of nihilism. But this time around, McKinnon and Frazier are channeling something else, too: hope.
“Our sound has this duality. There’s the punk side, there’s the synth side, and it’s always these two forces.”—McKinnon
“I was using a metaphor of a flower being picked and becoming an ornament in someone’s place, and it’s slowly dying,” McKinnon says. “The secret, the bit that brings a little bit of hope, is that the seed is still in the ground. They can’t see it and they can’t steal it. You watched this part die, but underneath, there’s something else.”
With his previous bands, McKinnon had approached his instrument in much the same way he had since he was a kid: Ramones-style power chords and fast-and-furious downstrokes on his trusty Fender ’72 Telecaster Deluxe. With Home Front, McKinnon had to rethink his playing so that it could coexist with Frazier’s ordnance of analog synths and drum machines.
Watch It Die, Home Front’s second LP, is a glorious blast of frantic, hopeful post-punk.
He looked for inspiration from bands he had always loved but hadn’t previously channeled: England’s ’80s post-punk and new wave exports like New Order, Joy Division, Depeche Mode, the Cure, A Flock of Seagulls, and Blitz. But he wasn’t just looking to do what they did; instead, he wanted to bring his hard-nosed punk style to the mix. “If the electronics are covered, then maybe the play is to bring that punk attack to the guitar to accent the synths,” he says.
On Watch It Die, McKinnon played almost everything through a 1979 Marshall JMP, giving him bright, saturated power chords that tracked well whether he was palm muting or fully strumming. The main exception was a cigar box amp made by a friend who works at an auto shop. It was miked close and cranked, giving them the trashy ’70s punk sound on “Young Offender.”
McKinnon used his Telecaster for most of the record, but he also brought out a 1979 Gibson Marauder with a swapped-in P-90 pickup, which he coupled with a German-made Van Hall fuzz pedal to find the nasty, scooped-out tone that appears on some of the record’s more straight-ahead punk songs like “Young Offender” and “For the Children (F*ck All).” On the new wave jams “Kiss the Sky” and “Between the Waves,” he pulled out a Hagstrom Viking that engineer Nik Kozub recorded by miking the semi-hollow body itself, giving the songs a thin, percussive jangle without having the low end of a proper acoustic muddying the mix.
For McKinnon, it was important to get his palm mutes sounding clean and punchy, and to have them perfectly aligned with the synth arpeggiators—even when he’d add swirls of reverb and delay in his chain. Enter his secret weapon: an old Roland SDE-3000 digital delay that he got from the TV studio where he works. McKinnon and Frazier used its BPM-sync function to dial it in to precisely match the tempo of the drum machines.
McKinnon also records all of the bass lines for Home Front. That, of course, comes with its own military-grade arsenal. On “Empire,” he pulled out all the stops. For the grand finale, he chained the Van Hall into a fully cranked Pro Co RAT, into the MXR Blue Box octave fuzz, and finally into a dimed-out Peavey Super Festival F-800B. It was “the nastiest fuzz bass I’ve ever played,” he says, creating a wall of sound inspired by My Bloody Valentine. Frazier accentuated that enormous gain-fest with eighth-note Roland 808s that he painstakingly tuned, note by note, so that each kick would follow the bass line, creating a pulsating effect that makes rhythmic sense of McKinnon’s fuzzed-out chaos.
That is, fittingly enough, the thematic throughline of Watch It Die: making sense of the madness. “Our lives are chaos all the time,” says McKinnon. “We have jobs that are going to end at any moment. The rent is too high, the groceries are too expensive, all these stresses, and then every time you open up your phone, there’s atrocities in the world. There’s shit your government’s doing, police breaking families apart, this is stuff you’re constantly thinking about, and it’s always hitting you.”
But Home Front aren’t just going to wallow in their sorrows. “On this record, I didn’t want to sound like, ‘Shit’s bad. I’m just gonna be kicking rocks,’” McKinnon continues. “It’s more like, ‘Shit’s bad, but this is how we’re gonna work through this, by having outlets that allow us to form like Voltron to terrorize the oppressors.’” PG
Reverb and delay. What two effects are better suited to live side-by-side in one pedal? Source Audio’s new Encounter reverb and delay is a mirror image of the company’s Collider, which explores the reverb/delay combo via a vintage lens. The mirror by which Encounter reflects the Collider, however, is more like the funhouse variety. There are many psychedelic, cosmic, and wildly refracted echoes to utilize in the Encounter. There are lots of practical ones that can be tuned to subtle ends, too. But Encounter’s realm-of-the-extra-real extras make it a companion for players that ply dreamy musical seas. It’s incredibly fun, a great spark for creativity, and, most certainly, a place to lose oneself.
Exponentially Unfolding
Of Encounter’s six reverb modes and six delay modes, four of them—the hypersphere, shimmers, and trem verb reverbs, and the kaleidoscope delay—are entirely new. Hypersphere, fundamentally, makes reverberations more particulate. Source Audio says it’s a reverb without direct reflections. In their most naked state, these reverberations can still sound a touch angular and perhaps not quite as ghostly and fluid as “no direct reflections” suggests. But they are still complex, appealing, immersive sounds. Odd reverberation clusters can conjure a confused sense of space and highlight different overtones and frequency peaks in random ways. At settings where you can hear this level of detail, hypersphere shines, particularly in spacious solo phrases. Hypersphere also features phase rate and pitch modulation depth functions via the control 1 and control 2 knobs, and they can further accent and enhance those frequency peaks, creating intoxicating, deep fractal reflection systems.
“Blends of the delay and reverb are the kind of places where you can lose track of a rainy day.”
The new trem verb mode can be practical or insane. The two effects together are a pillar of vintage electric guitar atmospherics. But the Encounter’s trem verb explodes those templates. As with the hypersphere mode, trem verb can zest simple chord melodies by using extreme effect settings at low mixes, where chaotic, half-hidden patterns dip in and out of the shadows, sometimes creating eerie counterpoint. But I loved trem verb most at extremes—mostly high mix, feedback, and decay settings with really slow modulation. Sounds here can be intense and vague—like strobe flashes piercing drifting fog. It might not be an ideal place to indulge fast, technical fretwork, but it’s a wonderland for exploring overtones, drone, and melodic possibilities.
Incidentally, the trem verb is a great match for the six delays, and the new kaleidoscope delay in particular, which fractures and scatters repeats in a million possible directions and spaces. Blends of the delay and reverb are the kind of places where you can lose track of a rainy day. The sound permutations often seem endless, and finding magic can take some attention and patience. But you can strike gold fast, too. You have to take care to save settings you really love (you can store as many as eight presets on board, and 128 total via midi) because it’s hard to resist the urge to meander through— and meditate on—hours of sound without stopping. Not all of the Encounter’s sounds are perfectly pleasing. Some combinations reveal peaky little chirps that betray digital origins—the merits of which are subjective and contextual. For the most part, though, the combined sounds are liquid and vividly complex, and can be especially enveloping at high mix and feedback.
Extended Reach
If the onboard controls don’t get you in enough trouble, downloading the Neuro 3 app, which unlocks deep control and functionality, is a minor wormhole. Take the case of trem verb—you can use Neuro 3 to change the wave shape or set up the reverb to affect the wet signal only, just the dry signal, or both of them. All of these changes open up a new system of tone caves as the sound evolves. If you’re deep in the nuance of a mix or arrangement, this functionality can be invaluable. And it’s a boon if you have nothing but time on your hands. In a state of engaged, intuitive workflow, I like to avoid these kinds of app dives. But having that much extended power on your phone or computer is impressive.
Neuro 3 extends the capability of the Encounter in other ways, too. The SoundCheck tool within Encounter is home to prerecorded loops of various instruments that you can then route through a virtual Encounter pedal. That means you can explore Encounter’s potential while stuck in a train station. It’s a real asset if you want to understand the pedal as completely as possible, and certainly a way to extract the most value from the unit’s considerable $399 price.
The Verdict
About that price. It looks steep. For most of us, it’s a significant investment. But when I consider how many sounds I found in the Encounter, how compact it is, and the possibilities that it opens up in performance and portable production (especially when you factor in the stereo ins and outs), that investment seems pretty sound. I must qualify all this by saying I was happiest with the Encounter when exploring its spaciest places—the kind of atmospheric layer where Spacemen 3, ambient producers, 1969 Pink Floyd, and slow-soul balladeers all hang. But there is room to roam for precision pickers that background radical effects, too.
Still looking to justify the cash outlay? Consider the Encounter as a portable outboard post-production and mixing asset. If you’re creating music built on big, shape-shifting ambience, it’s a cool thing to have in your bag of tricks. Different artists will mine more from the Encounter than others, so you should consider our ratings scores on a sliding scale. But as you contemplate the Encounter, be sure to factor in mystery paths that will beckon when you dive in. There’s lots of fuel for creation along most of them.
![Rig Rundown: Russian Circles’ Mike Sullivan [2025]](https://www.premierguitar.com/media-library/youtube.jpg?id=62303631&width=1245&height=700&quality=70&coordinates=0%2C0%2C0%2C0)
